Gladys Nilsson

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present Gladys Nilsson: New Works in Watercolor, an exhibition of works on paper. The exhibition will feature a large selection of the artist’s densely layered and intricately detailed watercolors, all painted between 2020 and 2022. Nilsson’s recent works mark a return to the medium for which she is best known.

In the early months of 2020, Nilsson produced a staggering number of modestly scaled watercolors. Works from the beginning of the pandemic, like Smoothy (2021), feature female figures in isolation. “If I were alone, they’d have to be as well,” said Nilsson. The figures contort themselves to stay within their 14-by-20-inch boundaries. “I ran out of large canvases just prior to shutdown,” said the artist, drawing attention to the way the physical reality of the pandemic merged with her artistic choices. “Are the figures asking to be let out into a larger venue?”

In her works since, Nilsson’s venues have expanded, and they are slowly returning to their pre-pandemic population densities. In Wheee (2021), a sizable woman perched on a tree branch cranes her neck downward, inspecting a diminutive man at the base of the tree, like a scientist discovering some new, curious species. It’s tempting to read into the works the lingering social awkwardness that has haunted some of us post-lockdown. Yet Nilsson imbues these new scenes with vivid color—a celebration of seeing others and being seen, of the sociality of display and spectatorship.

A Stretch too Far (2021) is filled to the brim with Nilsson’s winding, playful imagery. Over a dozen major and minor characters partake—peering at, touching, and grabbing each other in myriad variations. The painting functions as an index of her stylistic hallmarks. Nilsson playfully resurrects archaic painting conventions—the diptych, hierarchical scale, horror vacui, and continuous narrative—assigning new functions to each within her idiosyncratic graphical style. A mischievous green man pulls a woman’s fleshy pink leg into the second frame, which has been helpfully rotated to accommodate the unusual trees that stretch into the sky. A row of swimmers forms a frieze at the bottom of the composition, unaware of the drama unfolding above.

Nilsson first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduates (James Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. The artists’ styles were assertively idiosyncratic, but most had trained with professors Kathleen Blackshear and Paul Wieghardt and adapted some of their respective Surrealist and German Expressionist tendencies. Nilsson skillfully integrates elements of both in her playful investigations into human sexuality and its inherent contradictions. Nilsson was the first member of the Hairy Who—and one of the first women in history—to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973.

In 1990, Nilsson joined the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she continues to teach today.

Since 1966, Nilsson’s work has been the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions, including 16 at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California), and one at Hales Gallery (2019, London). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence). Most recently, Nilsson’s work appeared in The Candy Store (2018, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles), Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Chicago Imagists from the Phyllis Kind Collection (2019, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago), and How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London).

Nilsson’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.